Paul Krugman explains why Donald Trump's economic policies are better than most Republican candidates'

Krugman writes (via):

[Jeb] Bush has chosen to attack Mr. Trump as a false conservative, a proposition that is supposedly demonstrated by his deviations from current Republican economic orthodoxy: his willingness to raise taxes on the rich, his positive words about universal health care. And that tells you a lot about the dire state of the G.O.P. For the issues the Bush campaign is using to attack its unexpected nemesis are precisely the issues on which Mr. Trump happens to be right, and the Republican establishment has been proved utterly wrong.

To see what I mean, consider what was at stake in the last presidential election, and how things turned out after Mitt Romney lost.

During the campaign, Mr. Romney accused President Obama of favoring redistribution of income from the rich to the poor, and the truth is that Mr. Obama’s re-election did mean a significant move in that direction. Taxes on the top 1 percent went up substantially in 2013, both because some of the Bush tax cuts were allowed to expire and because new taxes associated with Obamacare kicked in. And Obamacare itself, which provides a lot of aid to lower-income families, went into full effect at the beginning of 2014.

Conservatives were very clear about what would happen as a result. Raising taxes on “job creators,” they insisted, would destroy incentives. And they were absolutely certain that the Affordable Care Act would be a “job killer.”

So what actually happened? As of last month, the U.S. unemployment rate, which was 7.8 percent when Mr. Obama took office, had fallen to 5.1 percent. For the record, Mr. Romney promised during the campaign that he would get unemployment down to 6 percent by the end of 2016. Also for the record, the current unemployment rate is lower than it ever got under Ronald Reagan. And the main reason unemployment has fallen so much is job growth in the private sector, which has added more than seven million workers since the end of 2012.

I’m not saying that everything is great in the U.S. economy, because it isn’t. There’s good reason to believe that we’re still a substantial distance from full employment, and while the number of jobs has grown a lot, wages haven’t. But the economy has nonetheless done far better than should have been possible if conservative orthodoxy had any truth to it. And now Mr. Trump is being accused of heresy for not accepting that failed orthodoxy?

So am I saying that Mr. Trump is better and more serious than he’s given credit for being? Not at all — he is exactly the ignorant blowhard he seems to be. It’s when it comes to his rivals that appearances can be deceiving. Some of them may come across as reasonable and thoughtful, but in reality they are anything but.

Mr. Bush, in particular, may pose as a reasonable, thoughtful type — credulous reporters even describe him as a policy wonk — but his actual economic platform, which relies on the magic of tax cuts to deliver a doubling of America’s growth rate, is pure supply-side voodoo.

And here’s what’s interesting: all indications are that Mr. Bush’s attacks on Mr. Trump are falling flat, because the Republican base doesn’t actually share the Republican establishment’s economic delusions.

The thing is, we didn’t really know that until Mr. Trump came along. The influence of big-money donors meant that nobody could make a serious play for the G.O.P. nomination without pledging allegiance to supply-side doctrine, and this allowed the establishment to imagine that ordinary voters shared its antipopulist creed. Indeed, Mr. Bush’s hapless attempt at a takedown suggests that his political team still doesn’t get it, and thinks that pointing out The Donald’s heresies will be enough to doom his campaign.

But Mr. Trump, who is self-financing, didn’t need to genuflect to the big money, and it turns out that the base doesn’t mind his heresies. This is a real revelation, which may have a lasting impact on our politics.

The "soft bigotry" of "lazy abstraction" or "indifference to the specifics of Baltimore's problem"

Will Wilkinson writes:

On Friday David Brooks argued that costly big-government efforts to alleviate poverty haven't done much to improve conditions for those living in Sandtown-Winchester, the Baltimore neighbourhood where Mr Gray lived. "Saying we should just spend more doesn’t really cut it," Mr Brooks writes. "[T]he real barriers to mobility are matters of social psychology, the quality of relationships in a home and a neighbourhood that either encourage or discourage responsibility, future-oriented thinking, and practical ambition." Ingrained codes of behaviour have "dissolved", he argues, leaving residents of impoverished areas "without the norms that middle-class people take for granted."

Paul Krugman is very annoyed by this line of thinking, though he does not mention Mr Brooks by name. "It has been disheartening to see some commentators still writing as if poverty were simply a matter of values," Mr Krugman writes, "as if the poor just mysteriously make bad choices and all would be well if they adopted middle-class values." According to Mr Krugman, thinkers like Mr Brooks have it back to front. The decline in values Mr Brooks laments is plainly a response to a hopeless lack of economic opportunity for the working classes. "[I]t should be obvious," Mr Krugman avers, "that middle-class values only flourish in an economy that offers middle-class jobs."

This is an important debate, but it is not the debate to have now.

As much as they bicker, Messrs Krugman and Brooks both agree that just about any occasion can be used to mount a favourite hobbyhorse. Mr Brooks is ever on the lookout for a chance to push the all-important role of culture. Mr Krugman scans the horizon itching to point out "the devastating effects of extreme and rising inequality". Culture and inequality certainly have something to do with the Baltimore riots, but Baltimoreans did not suddenly take to the streets to protest their poverty. They rose up to protest an apparently fresh instance of a very specific pattern of injustice. . . .

It is, in fact, a problem of both culture and inequality, but not as Messrs Brooks and Krugman are in the habit of discussing it. It is the problem of an insular, truculent police culture and the grievous harm it has done to the citizens the police were meant to protect. It's a problem of inequality under the law. In 2005 more than half of Baltimore's black men in their twenties were either in prison or on parole, according to one study. This is largely the consequence of tactics in the "War on Drugs", including changes in sentencing guidelines, which have disproportionately hurt young black men. . . .

So why are Messrs Brooks and Krugman using the occasion of Baltimore’s protests to squabble over whether values explain material conditions or material conditions explain values? There's a soft bigotry — let's call it the "soft bigotry of lazy abstraction" — in their indifference to the specifics of Baltimore’s problems.

Paul Krugman on two different kinds of "surveillance states"

"There was a really good article written five years ago by Jack Balkin at the Yale Law School. He said that technology means that we’re going to be living in a surveillance state. That’s just gonna happen. But there are different kinds of surveillance states. You can have a democratic surveillance state which collects as little data as possible and tells you as much as possible about what it’s doing. Or you can have an authoritarian surveillance state which collects as much as possible and tells the public as little as possible. And we are kind of on the authoritarian side."

(Here's the video.)

People and percentages

Paul Krugman points out the fallacy of characterizing a group of people as a 47% bloc: people don't stay in the same situation for their whole lives. So a statistical percentage isn't equivalent to a group of actual human beings.

The exact same fallacy is committed by those who divide the country into "the 1%" and "the 99%."

Tyler Cowen on Paul Krugman

"Paul Krugman is a great economist. But of all the people in my RSS feed, in terms of his quality and skill as a reader, he is not in the top 90 percent."

That's how Tyler Cowen concludes a reply to Krugman in their debate on income mobility.

(Here's Cowen's original post with 7 interesting points on income mobility, including speculation about why it's higher in Europe than in the US, and here's Krugman's response suggesting that Cowen's post is "anti-American.")

One of Cowen's co-bloggers, Alex Tabarrok, also defends Cowen. He gives three elegant hypotheticals which lead him to conclude that "economic mobility measures are overrated. What we should care about is growth." Whether or not you're not predisposed to agree with that view, I recommend clicking the link and considering Tabarrok's hypos.

Relatedly, here's a column by Thomas Sowell on income mobility. Excerpt:

All sorts of statements are made in politics and in the media as if that top 1 percent is an enduring class of people, rather than an ever-changing collection of individuals who have a spike in their income in a particular year for one reason or another. Turnover in other income brackets is also substantial.

There is nothing mysterious about this. Most people start out at the bottom, in entry-level jobs, and their incomes rise over time as they acquire more skills and experience.

Politicians and media talking heads love to refer to people who are in the bottom 20 percent in income in a given year as “the poor.” But, following the same individuals for 10 or 15 years usually shows the great majority of those individuals moving into higher income brackets.

The number who reach the top 20 percent greatly exceeds the number still stuck in the bottom 20 percent over the years. But such mundane facts cannot compete for attention with the moral melodramas conjured up by politicians and the media when they discuss “the rich” and “the poor.”

There are people who are genuinely rich and genuinely poor, in the sense of having very high or very low incomes for most, if not all, of their lives. But “the rich” and “the poor” in this sense are unlikely to add up to even 10 percent of the population.

For more of this, I recommend the chapter on income in Sowell's book Economic Facts and Fallacies.

If Mitt Romney doesn't "know" global warming is mostly caused by humans, is he "against science"?

Paul Krugman's latest column is headlined:

Republicans Against Science

Krugman writes:

Jon Huntsman Jr., a former Utah governor and ambassador to China, isn’t a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination. And that’s too bad, because Mr. Hunstman has been willing to say the unsayable about the G.O.P. — namely, that it is becoming the “anti-science party.” This is an enormously important development. And it should terrify us. . . .

In the past, Mr. Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts, has strongly endorsed the notion that man-made climate change is a real concern. But, last week, he softened that to a statement that he thinks the world is getting hotter, but “I don’t know that” and “I don’t know if it’s mostly caused by humans.” Moral courage!

So, Mitt Romney says he doesn't know. Is this uncertainty "terrify[ing]"?

The full Romney quote is: "Do I think the world's getting hotter? Yeah, I don't know that but I think that it is." So his basic conclusion is: "I think that it is," but he qualifies this with "I don't know." Isn't this appropriate for a layperson who's deferring to scientific consensus?

I've been reading Richard Feynman's book The Meaning of it All: Thoughts of a Citizen Scientist. Here's what Feynman said about uncertainty:

It is necessary and true that all of the things we say in science, all of the conclusions, are uncertain, because they are only conclusions. They are guesses as to what is going to happen, and you cannot know what will happen, because you have not made the most complete experiments. . . .

Scientists, therefore, are used to dealing with doubt and uncertainty. All scientific knowledge is uncertain. This experience with doubt and uncertainty is important. I believe that it is of very great value, and one that extends beyond the sciences. I believe that to solve any problem that has never been solved before, you have to leave the door to the unknown ajar. You have to permit the possibility that you do not have it exactly right. Otherwise, if you have made up your mind already, you might not solve it.

So what we call scientific knowledge today is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty. Some of them are most unsure; some of them are nearly sure; but none is absolutely certain. Scientists are used to this. We know that it is consistent to be able to live and not know. Some people say, "How can you live without knowing?" I do not know what they mean. I always live without knowing.

Remember, Feynman said this about all scientific conclusions, including ones about much simpler questions than how much the billions of people in the world are contributing to climate change. And he was describing the level of doubt that even scientists should have about their own fields of expertise, let alone the appropriate attitude of a layperson. Feynman said this isn't some weird defect in science, but it's essential to science. If Krugman is terrified at the idea of not "knowing," maybe he's the one who's against science.

Are Paul Krugman and David Brooks in a secret feud?

Jonathan Chait gathers the evidence that Krugman and Brooks have been planting their New York Times columns with implicit attacks on each other.

Chait concludes:

Brooks views Krugman as making himself a hero to the liberal choir, while he (Brooks) fearlessly challenges both sides. Krugman sees Brooks as residing comfortably within the cozy embrace of the conventional wisdom, whereas he (Krugman) risks being cast as a partisan or a radical by arbiters of respectability like Brooks for following the logic through to its conclusions. . . .

What makes the feud somewhat pathological is the Times' convention of keeping its columnists from openly debating each other. I suppose this is designed to advance the cause of civility. But the reality is that this just creates a lot of sniping, and the inability to quote and describe each others' arguments in any detail makes it impossible to treat them seriously.

Are conservatives in academia victims of discrimination and deserving of affirmative action?

This New York Times article has gotten a lot of attention for raising that question (by focusing on Jonathan Haidt, who's concerned about the underrepresentation of conservatives even though he himself is a liberal).

But the really odd thing is, as Megan McArdle points out: every time this topic comes up, liberals and conservatives both seem to do a 180 on their usual talking points about discrimination and diversity. Specifically:

Conservatives are usually reluctant to agree that women and minorities are still often victims of structural or personal bias--despite numerical underrepresentation and some fairly compelling studies showing that hiring is not race or gender blind. Yet when it comes to conservatives in academia, they suddenly sound like sociologists, discussing hostile work environment, the role of affinity networks in excluding out groups, unconscious bias, and the compelling evidence from statistical underrepresentation.

Meanwhile, liberals, who are usually quick to assume that underrepresentation represents some form of discrimination--structural or personal--suddenly become, as Haidt notes, fierce critics of the notion that numerical representation means anything. Moreover, they start generating explanations for the disparity that sound suspiciously like some old reactionary explaining that blacks don't really want to go into management because they're much happier without all the responsibility. Conservatives are too stupid to become academics; they aren't open new ideas; they're too aggressive and hierarchical; they don't care about ideas, just money. In other words, it's not our fault that they're not worthy.

Besides, liberals suddenly argue, we shouldn't look for every sub-population to mirror the composition of the population at large; just as Greeks gravitated towards diners in 1980s New York, and the small market business was dominated by Koreans, liberals are attracted to academia, and conservatives to, well, some other profession.

Part of what's going on here is that everyone wants to point out the hypocrisy of people who are on the other side from them. But hypocrisy often cuts both ways: if your opponents are taking positions that directly contradict each other, and both of them are the exact opposite of what you believe, then doesn't that imply that you're also taking contradictory positions?

McArdle quotes Paul Krugman's defense of liberals on this issue:

Every once in a while you get stories like this one, about the underrepresentation of conservatives in academics, that treat ideological divides as being somehow equivalent to racial differences. This is a really, really bad analogy.

And it's not just the fact that you can choose your ideology, but not your race. Ideologies have a real effect on overall life outlook, which has a direct impact on job choices.

McArdle has an apt response:

I have no idea what distinction one is supposed to make between beliefs and something you "can't change". Could Paul Krugman become a devout Baptist and a supply sider tomorrow, if the financial incentives were right? I devoutly hope not. I presume that Paul Krugman . . . could no more change his beliefs than he could change his native language. It is easier (in most cases) to pretend different ideas than a different race--but we rightly think that it was horrific to force blacks to "pass" as a condition of being treated like a full human being.

But what about Krugman's other point that's supposed to show how ideology-based discrimination is nothing like race-based discrimination? "Ideologies have a real effect on overall life outlook, which has a direct impact on job choices." Oh. But wait a minute . . . how exactly does that show that there's no analogy between ideology and race/gender? Is Krugman trying to say that that gender and race have no correlation to job choices? I don't see why he'd assume that. As for gender, well, men and women are different in many ways; you'd have to be pretty naive to be shocked at the possibility that certain jobs are more appealing to men while others are more appealing to women. Race may be trickier, but should we really assume that race isn't correlated with job choices?

Krugman (a Nobel Prize-winning economist) seems to be doing some awfully sloppy thinking here, and McArdle is right about the shameless hypocrisy on both sides.

I also wonder if Krugman considered that the fact that ideology does have to do with different outlooks on life (as he says) makes ideological discrimination a particularly bad thing. If academics tend to dogmatically shut out certain outlooks and privilege others, so much the worse for academia.

IN THE COMMENTS: LemmusLemmus says, agreeing with that last paragraph:

One often hears the argument for affirmative action for African Americans in academia that it enriches discussion because African Americans contribute a different perspective on issues (which can be relevant at least in the social sciences and some humanities). And that's not true of conservatives? Ha!

ADDED: A commenter on Krugman's post sums up what I imagine is the real thinking behind the liberal reaction to this topic:

Besides, Paul, people who disagree with you are stupid, right?

Can't have stupid people teaching. They're too stupid!